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It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals:
AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve…

The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing…

Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly…

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation as part of Open Access Week at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (ie. OCADU) on "predatory" open access journals. It seemed to be well-received at the time and since then I've gotten some positive feedback as well.
So I thought I'd share…

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As of November 1st, 2017, ScienceBlogs is shutting down, necessitating relocation of this blog.
It's been over eight years and 1279 posts. It's been predatory open access publishers, April Fool's posts and multiple wars on science. A long and wonderful trip, career-transforming, network building…

Deja vu all over again. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
Canadian science under the Harper government from 2006 to 2015 was a horrific era of cuts and closures and muzzling and a whole lot of other attack on science.
One of the most egregious was the threat to close the PEARL…

The last one of these was in mid-June, so we're picking up all the summer stories of scientific mayhem in the Trump era. The last couple of months have seemed especially apocalyptic, with Nazis marching in the streets and nuclear war suddenly not so distant a possibility. But along with those…

After a bit of an unexpected summer hiatus, I'm back to regular blogging, at least as regular as it's been the last year or two.
Of course, I'm a committed Game of Thrones fan. I read the first book in paperback soon after it was reprinted, some twenty years ago. And I've also been a fan of the HBO…

Another couple of weeks' worth of stories about how science is faring under the Donald Trump regime. If I'm missing anything important, please let me know either in the comments or at my email jdupuis at yorku dot ca. If you want to use a non-work email for me, it's dupuisj at gmail dot com.
The…

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As I write this, I'm told that there are eleven water cannon vehicles heading to the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, to attempt to cool down nuclear material that is exposed and exuding (I dare not use the word "leaking" lest I be thought an alarmist) radiation at a rate that seems to be as alarming to the engineers and nuclear experts on the scene as it is assuaging to…

Prepare yourself.
The Te Papa Museum of New Zealand has a new specimen locked in a vault: a colossal squid that will be thawed and dissected (they think!) on streaming video.
Here is the necromantic chamber.
Wait! No protective runes, no array of emergency thuribles, no pentagram, no mysterious idols of jade and obsidian? This may not go well.